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A Swap Meet With the British, but It’s Tricky

Jennifer 8. Lee/The New York TimesA pop-up shop at 186 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side will play host to British boutiques until Sept. 13 as part of a neighborhood exchange program.

Updated, 8:50 a.m. Wednesday | Over the next few weeks, the Lower East Side will gain a British flair: fish and chips, croquet and afternoon tea. The neighborhood is taking part in an exchange program with the Newburgh Quarter in London. (We are sending them bagels and American-style Halloween.) Yes, at times London and New York are rivals, but other times we work well as peers.

City Room was intrigued. Was the Newburgh Quarter really the London counterpart of the Lower East Side — an erstwhile historical home to working-class immigrant tenements that also became a hipster enclave?

No. Even though the promotional material bills the Newburgh Quarter bills as a “legendary neighborhood” that has been a birthplace to pioneering designers “since the 1960s,” the name is in fact a very new arrival. It consist of six streets in the Carnaby Street shopping area that have been carved out and renamed. In Nexis, there are only 18 mentions of it dating back to 2008. And Google estimates just about 5,000 results for the term. In contrast Lower East Side and New York City has more than two million mentions on Google (Warning: those Google estimates are inflated and can swing wildly.) And the mentions are mostly in travel guides and self-promotional material from the retailers in the area.

We checked with our shopping-loving friends in London, and one, Angela Ip, wrote back, “If I asked my friend to meet me in Newburgh Quarter in Carnaby, I don’t think they would know which area I was referring to.”

So what’s up with Newburgh Quarter? Are the Brits were trying to pull a fast one on New Yorkers who might not be much the wiser about London?

Jessica Klynsma, a spokeswoman for the Lower East Side Business Improvement District, said, “It’s a new neighborhood so they are trying to brand it.” She added that a property company, Shaftesbury, which manages large areas in London’s West End (including parts of Carnaby Street), had approached the Lower East Side Business Improvement District with the idea of the exchange about a year ago.

Shaftesbury’s investments in the Carnaby Street area include 130 shops, 37 restaurants, clubs, cafes and bars, 239,000 square feet of office space. It owns approximately $600 million of real estate in that neighborhood, which is about around 37 percent of the company’s real estate portfolio.

The Lower East Side has a certain mom-and-popness that is true both on the low end and high end, said Kate Stober, a spokeswoman for the Tenement Museum. “It’s a very personal neighborhood. People have such a personal attachment. It’s all individuals.”

When Newburgh Quarter and Shaftesbury were described to her, she said: “It sounds like a big mall, an outdoor mall, the idea of a mall being all owned by the same company and person.” (Among the other neighborhoods Shaftesbury “owns” in London: Chinatown.)

New York’s Lower East Side, Ms. Stober said, “feels like an authentic place.”

She added, “It’s a real place, not a Disneyland.”

So why would the company approach the Lower East Side Business Improvement District? “It sounds like they are trying to get into that history-and-hip thing that the Lower East Side has,” Ms. Stober said.

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